CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A North Carolina man was charged in a music streaming fraud case, after allegedly using artificial intelligence to generate fake streams on platforms like Spotify, then pocketing $10 million in royalties.
As the use of AI grows, creators may be concerned that streaming fraud would be something we could see more often.
Kristen Roberts, an intellectual property attorney at Trestle Law, told WCNC Charlotte, this kind of scheme can be confusing.
"It's really like putting on a concert or producing a concert where nobody shows up, but you're still getting the money from the ticket sales," she said. "So that's a really good way to think about it."
Roberts explained, since platforms like Spotify pay artists depending on the number of plays, streaming fraud exposes some of these new challenges of art and artificial intelligence.
"This had been going on for years, since as early as 2017," she explained. "And what they did was, they got together and they created thousands of bots, and these bots are just programs that are designed to just run in the background and play these, you know, pieces of music."
Although streaming companies have been trying to address the possibility of this kind of scheme, Roberts said the operation of Cornelius man, Michael Smith, went undetected for years.
"Rather than streaming the same song a billion times, they had thousands of songs that were created by AI so that it could sample a few streams at a time," Roberts outlined. "It wouldn't necessarily flag some of the technology that these streaming platforms have put into place."
With some companies touting themselves as "promotional," that can help get an artist's music onto a big playlist, Roberts cautioned musicians to know who they're working with to promote their music.
"Oftentimes, they are employing tactics that are in violation of the terms and conditions, and the problem is that it's not just, 'Hey, I didn't know they were doing it,'" Roberts explained. "That's not going to absolve you from getting a strike on your account or getting your music removed altogether."
Roberts said avoiding those kinds of companies is important.
"But also knowing how to communicate with these platforms when your music is removed for lawful reasons, that's happening as well," Roberts said.
Roberts added, while hard-working artists do what they can to protect their earnings from these kinds of crimes, law enforcement is also using technology to catch up with these types of crimes.
"If you can think back to when the internet was invented, for example," Roberts said. "We were thinking of all of these different types of internet crimes that were going to happen and a lot of them did end up happening, but we wind up catching up and finding ways to curtail that kind of bad action."
Contact Jane Monreal at jmonreal@wcnc.com and follow her on Facebook, X and Instagram.